Get libarchive-3.0.4 from http://libarchive.github.com/
Configure it (I do a minimal build for the binary packages: ./configure --enable-static --disable-shared --disable-xattr --disable-acl --with-zlib --without-bz2lib --without-lzmadec --without-iconv --without-lzma --without-nettle --without-expat --without-xml2)
Build it
DON'T install it
Instead, create an includes directory in KindleTool/KindleTool/
Copy archive.h & archive_entry.h from the libarchive-3.0.4/libarchive directory in that includes directory
Create a lib directory in KindleTool/KindleTool/
Copy libarchive.a from the libarchive-3.0.4/.libs directory in that lib directory(it is there... really...)
And finally, make clean && make in KindleTool

@DuckieTigger: The 'mingw' binaries are native, like silver18 said, you can run them in your favorite native Windows terminal . (One thing of note, though: it'll probably horribly break on anything non-ASCII, and even then, some libarchive output might be mangled [char vs wchar, and all the fun it implies])..

The 'cygwin' binaries, on the other hand, will only run inside a cygwin shell, but should be as 'stable' as any other POSIX build, so, if you encounter a weird error with the native binary, it can't hurt to check if a POSIX-friendly build fails in the same way .

@twobob: IIRC, there's now a separate buildscript (tools/simple-linux-static-build.sh) that handles that automagically, because there's apparently a staggering number of Linux distro out there running out of date software ;D.

... and to add a bit more to the stress, could you please take a look at this post and the follow-ups? Bottom line is that there seems to be a B01F Paperwhite out there (japanese 3G model), which doesn't seem to be supported yet (though I didn't check as thoroughly as I should have, I'm just assuming that's the reason).

If so, could you please include support for that model, and release the binaries? That'd be very much appreciated... Thanks a ton!

(@ixtab: If you really need Linux binaries, I can probably rush those tonight).

Yeah, that would really be great! I'm currently looking at the JBPatch stuff - thanks to Amazon, everything got broken again with the new FW, of course , but I'd really like to release a version that works for everyone (as of now).

@twobob: IIRC, there's now a separate buildscript (tools/simple-linux-static-build.sh) that handles that automagically, because there's apparently a staggering number of Linux distro out there running out of date software ;D.

@NiLuJe, make a heroic attempt, rewrite it in Go. You'll get for free: compress, archive and crypto support in standard library, statically linked binaries, easy and fast cross-compiling for Windows, Linux, OS X.